The Years With Laura Diaz

5. Xalapa: 1920

“YOU WERE WRONG, ORLANDO. Not here. Find another way for us to meet. Use your imagination. Don’t mock my family or make me hate myself.”

Laura resumed family life, which had been injured by the death of her grandfather and by her father’s broken health. As for the death of Mrs. Aznar and being seduced by Orlando, Laura expelled both not from memory but from recollection; she never referred to either of them again, never mentioned them to anyone, never mentioned them to herself. She was not to recollect them, no matter how hard her memory may have worked to retain them, forever, under lock and key, in the vault of the past from which nothing was to be removed. To add “Orlando Ximénez” and “Armona Aznar” to the sorrows and difficulties of her home life would have been unendurable, and likewise the unhealthy contagion with which Orlando infected her memory of Santiago, which Laura did indeed want to preserve pure and explicit. She could not forgive him for having damaged that part of Santiago’s life she still kept in her soul.

Does Santiago also live in my father’s soul? wondered the girl, staring at Fernando Daz’s stricken face.

It was impossible to know. The accountant-banker’s diplegia was advancing at a wicked pace, rapid and regular. First he lost the use of his legs, soon the rest of his body, and later his ability to speak. Laura had no room in her heart for anything but intense pity for him — confined, finally, to a wheelchair, wearing a bib, fed as if he were a baby by the devoted María de la O, staring at the world with indecipherable eyes that did not signal whether he was listening, thinking, or communicating, except for a desperate blinking and an equally desperate effort not to blink by keeping his eyes open, alert, inquisitive, beyond a person’s normal endurance, as if one day, should he close his eyes, he would not be able to open them ever again. His gaze filled with glass and water, while his eyebrows developed remarkable movement, giving their unusual new positions an expressiveness that made Laura fearful. Like two arches supporting all that was left of his personality, her father’s eyebrows did not rise in surprise but arched even more, as if both questioning and communicating.

Aunt María de la O did her best to attend to the invalid while Leticia attended to the household. But it was Leticia who learned, slowly but surely, to read her husband’s eyes, to hold his hand and communicate with him.

“He wants you to put his tiepin in his tie, María de la O.”

“He wants us to take him for an outing to Los Berros.”

“He’s in the mood for rice and beans.”

Was her mother telling the truth or was she creating a simulacrum of communication and, therefore, of life? Mara de la O would do the painful chores for Leticia; she took charge of cleaning the invalid with warm towels and oatmeal soap, dressed him every morning in a suit, vest, starched collar, tie, dark socks, and low boots, as if the head of the household were going to the office, and undressed him at night to put him, with the help of Zampaya, in bed at nine.

The only thing Laura knew to do was to take her father’s hand and read him the French and English novels he adored, learning those languages in a kind of homage to her broken father. Fernando Daz’s physical collapse was swiftly apparent on his features. He aged, but he kept control over his feelings, and Laura saw him weep only once: when she read him the emotional death scene of the boy Little Father Time, in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, who commits suicide when he hears his parents say they can’t feed so many mouths. That weeping, nevertheless, cheered Laura. Her father understood her. Her father was listening and feeling, behind the opaque veil of his sickness.

“Go out, daughter. Live the life of people your own age. Nothing would sadden your father more than knowing you’d sacrificed yourself for him.”

Why did her mother use that subjunctive mode of speech, which according to the Misses Ramos was a mode that had to be connected with another verb in order to have meaning — indicating hypothesis, the first Miss Ramos would say; or desire, the second would add; something like “If I were you …,” the two of them would say in one voice, although in different places. Living day to day with the invalid, without foreseeing any end, was the only health that father and daughter could share. If Fernando understood her, Laura would tell him what she was doing every day, how life was in Xalapa, what new things were going on … and then Laura realized there were no new things. Her schoolmates had graduated, married, gone off to live in Mexico City, far away, because their husbands took them off, because the Revolution was centralizing power even more than the Daz dictatorship had, because new agrarian and labor laws were threatening the rich provincials, many of whom had resigned themselves to losing what they’d had, to abandoning the lands and industries that had been devastated by the fighting in order to remake their lives in the capital, safe from rural and provincial abandonment — all that carried Laura’s friends far away.

Left behind were the stimulants provided by Orlando and by the Catalan anarchist; even Laura’s ardent cult of Santiago cooled, yielding to a mere succession of hours, days, years. Customs in Xalapa did not change, as if the outside world couldn’t penetrate its sphere of tradition, placid self-satisfaction, and, perhaps, wisdom in a city that miraculously — although by force of will, too — had not been touched physically by the national turbulence of those years. The Revolution in Veracruz meant, more than anything, for the rich a fear of losing what they had and for the poor a desire to conquer what they needed. While they were still in Veracruz, Don Fernando had spoken, vaguely, about the influence of anarcho-syndicalist ideas that came to Mexico through the port, and later the presence in his own house of the never-seen Armonía Aznar gave life to those concepts, which Laura did not know much about. The end of her school years and the disappearance of her friends — because they married and Laura didn’t, because they went off to the capital and Laura stayed in Xalapa — forced her, in order to have the normalcy her mother Leticia wanted for her as a relief from the family penury, to befriend girls younger than she, juvenile compared to Laura not only in age but in experience — for she was Santiago’s sister, the young object of Orlando’s seduction, the daughter of a father battered by sickness and a mother unshakable in her sense of duty.

Perhaps Laura, to numb her wounded sensibility, let herself be led without much thought into a life that both was and was not her own. It was at hand, it was comfortable, it didn’t matter much, she wasn’t in the mood to reflect on impossibilities, not even on something simply different from daily life in Xalapa. Nothing would perturb the daily stroll through her favorite garden, Los Berros, and its tall poplars with their silvery leaves and its iron benches, its fountains of greenish water, its moss-covered railings, the title girls skipping rope, the older girls walking in one direction and boys in the other, all of them flirting, brazenly staring or averting their eyes, but all of them with the chance to look at each other for a moment, yet as often as excitement or patience might demand.

“Watch out for gentlemen with walking sticks on their shoulders in Juárez Park,” mothers would warn their daughters. “Their intentions are dishonorable.”

The park was the other preferred open-air meeting place. Avenues of beech trees, laurels, araucarias, and jacarandas formed a cool, perfumed vault over the minor pleasures of skating in the park, going to charity fairs in the park, and, on clear days, seeing from the park the marvel of Orizaba Peak — Citlaltépetl, mountain of the star, the highest volcano in Mexico. Citlaltépetl had a magic all its own because the great mountain seemed to move according to the quality of the daylight or season of the year: near in the diaphanous dawn, farther away in the solar heat of midday, veiled in the afternoon drizzles, given its most visible glory during sunset — the day’s second birth — and at night, everyone knew that the great crest was the invisible but immobile star in the Veracruz firmament, its fairy godmother.

It rained constantly, and then Laura and her new unequal girlfriends (she couldn’t even remember their names) ran to take cover outside the park, zigzagging under the eaves of houses and leaping over the gushes of water crisscrossing in the middle of the street. But it was lovely to listen to the warm showers on the roofs and the whisper of the plants. The little things decide to live. Then, as night became calm, the recently washed streets would fill with the scent of tulips and jonquils. Young people came out to stroll. From seven to eight was “the window hour,” when suitors would visit their favorite girls at balconies intentionally left open and — something normal in Xalapa but strange in any other part of the world — husbands would court their own wives again at “the window hour,” as if they wanted to renew their vows and rekindle their emotions.

In those years, when at almost the same time the Mexican Revolution and the European war culminated and ended, movies became the great novelty. The armed revolution was winding down: the battles after General Obregón’s great victory over Pancho Villa at Celaya were only skirmishes. The once powerful Division of the North was disintegrating into bands of outlaws with each faction seeking support, arrangements, advantages, and ideals (in that order) after the triumph of Venustiano Carranza, the Constitutionalist Army, and, in 1917, the promulgation of the new Magna Carta — that was what the newspapers called it — the object of examination, debate, and constant fear among the gentlemen who gathered every evening at the Xalapa Casino.

“If the agrarian reform is put into effect exactly as written, we’ll be ruined,” said the father of the young man from Córdoba whom Laura had danced with and who had talked only of roosters and hens.

“They won’t do that. The country has to eat. Only the big properties produce,” said the father of the red-haired and abusive young tennis player, trying to be conciliatory.

“And workers’ rights?” joined in the elderly husband of the lady who had waxed nostalgic about the oh-so-handsome French Zouaves. “What is there to say about ‘workers’ rights’ stuck into the Constitution like a pair of banderillas in a bull’s back?”

“Like Jesus wearing six-guns, my dear man.”

“Red Battalions, House of the Workers of the World … I assure you, Carranza and Obregón are Communists and are going to do the same thing here that Lenin and Trotsky are doing in Russia.”

“None of this is relevant here, as you gentlemen will soon see.”

“A million dead, gentlemen, and all for what?”

“I assure you, most of them died not in battles but in bars.”

That provoked general hilarity, but when some films of revolutionary battles made by the Abitia brothers were shown in the Victoria Salon, the cultivated public protested. No one wanted to go to the movies to see huarache-wearing men wielding rifles. Movies meant Italian movies, only Italian. Emotion and beauty were the exclusive privilege of Italy’s divas and vamps of the silver screen; society suffered and exulted with the dramas of Pina Menichelli, Italia Almirante Manzini, Giovanna Terribili González — stupendous women with darkly shadowed shining eyes, disturbing brows, electric hairdos, voracious mouths, and tragic gestures. Why did the Gish sisters hide their faces when they wept, why did Mary Pickford dress up as a beggar? If you want poverty, go out on the street; if you want to avoid emotion, visit your neighbors.

The neighbors’ homes went on being, in Laura’s life and in the life of everyone in provincial society, the irreplaceable seats of communal life. People “received” constantly if sporadically, almost taking turns. In private homes, people played lottery and blackjack, forming large circles around the tables. It was there that culinary customs were preserved. It was there the youngest girls were taught to dance, taking little steps through the rooms, “you do it this way, lifting your skirt,” preparing them for the grand soirees at the Casino; and it was the place for baptism parties, for setting up the crèche at Christmas, with the Christ Child in his manger and the Wise Men and, in the center of the room, the “French Ship” filled with sweets that was opened up after midnight. Mass. And then Carnival and its masked balls, the tableaux vivants at the end of term at the Misses Ramos’ school, with their representations of Father Hidalgo Proclaiming Independence or the Indian Juan Diego negotiating with the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the principal party was the Casino hall every August 19. It was there that all of local society met.

Laura would have preferred to stay at home, not only to be with her parents but because since the death of the Catalan anarchist the attic had been sealed. She began to assign a special value to every corner of her house, as if she knew that the pleasure of living and growing up there would not last forever. Her grandfather’s Catemaco house, the apartment above the bank and facing the sea in Veracruz, and now the one-story home on Lerdo Street in Xalapa … how many more homes would she live in over the years of her life? She could foresee none of them. She could only recall yesterday’s homes and memorize today’s, creating sanctuaries in her uncertain life — never again foreseeable and secure as it had been during her childhood near the lake — which she would need to hold on to in the time to come. A time that young Laura could not imagine, no matter how often she said to herself, “No matter what happens, the future will be different from this present.” She did not want to imagine the worst reasons why life would change. The worst of all was the death of her father. She was going to say that the saddest was staying behind, lost and forgotten, in a little town, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia in their father’s house, stripped of the reason for being settled there and being unmarried. Grandfather was dead; Hilda played the piano for nothing, for no one; Virginia piled up pages, poems, that no one would ever know. The active life was preferable, a life committed to another life, which was the case of Aunt María de la O, constantly caring for Fernando Díaz.

“What would I do without you, María de la O?” the indefatigable Mutti Leticia would ask — seriously, without sighing.

Laura, as once she had memorized Santiago’s bedroom in Veracruz, now, eyes closed, ran through the patios, the corridors, the floors of Marseilles brick, the palms, the ferns, the mahogany armoires, the mirrors, the four-poster beds, the clay jugs of filtered water, the dressing table, the pitcher, the closet, and, in her mother’s domain, the kitchen redolent of mint and parsley.

“Don’t turn in on yourself the way your Grandmother Kelsen did,” Leticia would say. She could no longer endure the sadness of her own gaze. “Go out with your girlfriends. Have fun. You’re only twenty-one.”

“What you mean, Mutti, is that I’m already twenty-one. At my age, you’d been married for years, and I’d been born — and no, Mutti, don’t even bother asking: I’m not fond of any boy.”

“Have they stopped coming to see you? Because of everything that’s happened?”

“No, Mutti, I’m the one who’s been avoiding them.”

As if responding to a warning of an incomprehensible change, vibrating like late-summer leaves, the girls Laura would visit, younger than she, had all decided to prolong their childhood, even if they made coquettish concessions to an adulthood they, disconcerted, did not wish. They called themselves “the chubbies” and played practical jokes inappropriate to their eighteen years. They jumped rope in the park so they’d have color in their cheeks before going on the seductive evening stroll; they would take long siestas before tennis at Los Berros; they would innocently mock their costumed boyfriends during Carnival:

“Are you a circus clown?”

“Don’t insult me. Can’t you see I’m a prince?”

They would skate in Juárez Park to lose the pounds they put on eating “devils,” cakes filled with chocolate and covered with marzipan, the delight of sweet-tooths in this city that smelled like a bakery. They volunteered to be in the tableaux vivants at the end of the term in the Misses Ramos’ academy, the only time when one could see that the teachers really were two different people, since one presided over the tableaux while the other worked behind the scenes.

“Something awful happened to me, Laura. I was playing the part of the Virgin, when I suddenly had to go. I had to make terrible faces so Miss Ramos would close the curtain. I ran to make wee-wee and came back to be the Virgin again.”

“In my house, they’ve gotten bored with my comedies and costumes, Laura. My parents have hired only one spectator to admire me. What do you think of that?”

“You must be happy, Margarita.”

“The thing is, I’ve decided to become an actress.”

Then they all rushed madly to the balcony to see the cadets from the Preparatoria march by, rifles on their shoulders, wearing their French képis, their uniforms with gold buttons, and their very taut flies.

The bank informed them they’d have to give up the house in September, after the Casino ball. Don Fernando would get a pension, but the new bank director would, as is natural, be coming to live in the house. There would also be a ceremony up in the attic, the unveiling of a plaque in honor of Doña Armonía Aznar. The Mexican trade unions had decided to honor the valiant comrade who had donated money, had delivered mail to the Red Battalions and the House of the Workers of the World during the Revolution, and had even sheltered union men on the run right here, in the house of the bank director.

“Did you know that, Mutti?”

“No, Laura. And what about you, sister?”

“Not a clue!”

“It’s better not to know everything, isn’t that so?”

None of the three dared to think that a man as honorable as Don Fernando would knowingly have tolerated a conspiracy under his own roof, especially with Santiago’s having been shot on November 21, 1910. When she thought about it, Laura imagined that Orlando Ximénez knew the truth, that he was the intermediary between the attic and Doña Armonía’s anarcho-syndicalists. Then she discarded that suspicion; Orlando. the frivolous … or perhaps for that very reason was he the likeliest suspect? Laura laughed heartily. She’d just read Baroness d’Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel to her father, so she was imagining poor Orlando as a Mexican Pimpernel, a dandy at night and an anarchist by day … saving union men from the firing squad.

No novel prepared Laura for the next episode of her life. Leticia and María de la O set about looking for a comfortable house that they could afford under Fernando’s pension. The half sister thought that given the circumstances, Hilda and Virginia should sell the Catemaco coffee plantation and use the money to buy a house in Xalapa where they could all live together and save on expenses.

“And why shouldn’t we all go back to Catemaco? After all, we did live there … and we were happy,” said Leticia, without sighing like her self-absorbed mother.

Her question became superfluous as soon as the unmarried sisters Hilda and Virginia appeared at the Xalapa house, loaded with packages, boxes of books, steamer chests, seamstress dummies, cages filled with parrots, and even the Steinway piano.

People gathered in Lerdo Street to observe the arrival of such curious baggage, for the two sisters’ belongings filled a mule cart to overflowing. Covered with dust, the sisters themselves looked like refugees from a battle lost many years ago, with huge straw hats tied under their chins and gauze veils that protected their faces from flies, the sun, and the highway filth.

Theirs was a brief story. The Veracruz farm workers had armed themselves and quickly occupied the Kelsen hacienda and all the other properties in the area, declared them agrarian cooperatives, and run the owners off the land.

“There was no way to warn you,” said Aunt Virginia. “Here we are.”

They hadn’t known that the Xalapa house would no longer be theirs in September, after the Casino ball in August. Now, with her sisters added to her burden, her husband an invalid, and Laura having no marriage on the horizon, Leticia finally gave in and burst into tears. The expropriated sisters exchanged perplexed glances. Leticia begged their pardon, drying her tears on her apron, and invited them to make themselves at home. That night, Aunt María de la O came to Laura’s bedroom, sat down next to her, and caressed the girl’s head.

“Don’t be discouraged, child. Just look at me. Sometimes you must have thought that life’s been difficult for me, especially when I lived alone with my mother. But you know something? Being born is a joy even if you were conceived in sadness and misery. I mean inner sadness and misery, more than outer. You come into the world, and your origin is erased, being born is always a party, and I’ve done nothing but celebrate my going through life, not caring two cents where I came from, what happened at the beginning, how and where my mother gave birth to me, how my father behaved … Know something? Your grandmother Cosima redeemed everything, but even without her, without all I owe your grandmother and how much I adore her, I celebrate the world, I know I came to the world to celebrate life, through thick and thin, child, and I’m going to go on celebrating, damn it to hell. And excuse me for talking like someone from Alvarado, but that’s where I grew up …”

María de la O drew her hand away from Laura’s head for a moment and gave her niece a radiant smile, as if the little aunt always brought warmth and joy on her lips and in her eyes.

“And something else, Laurita, to complete the picture. Your grandfather brought me to live with you, and that saved me, I can’t say it often enough. But your grandmother did not concern herself any more with my mother, as if it were enough to save me and Old Nick himself could take her. The one who did concern himself was your father, Fernando. I don’t know what would have become of my mother if Fernando hadn’t looked out for her, helped her, given her money, and allowed her to grow old with dignity. Pardon me for being blunt, but there’s nothing sadder than an old whore. What I want to say is just this: the important thing is being alive and where you’re alive. We’re going to save this home and the people in it, Laura. María de la O swears it, the aunt you more than anyone else have respected. I never forget!”

She was getting fat, and it was rather hard for her to move about. Whenever she went for a walk with Fernando in his wheelchair, people would look away, not wanting to feel sorry for the two, the invalid man and the ashen mulatta with fat ankles who insisted on being out and around, ruining things for young, healthy people. María de la O’s will was greater than any obstacle, and the four sisters, the day after Hilda and Virginia arrived, decided not only to find a house for the family but to turn it into a guest house, contribute to its maintenance, each one would give her part, and take care of Fernando.

“And as for you, Laura, I beg you not to worry,” said Aunt Hilda.

“You will lack for nothing,” added Aunt Virginia.

… and I wasn’t worried, dear aunts, Mutti, I wasn’t worried, I know I’ll lack for nothing, I’m the little girl of the house, I’m not twenty-one, I’m still seven, defenseless but protected as before the first death, before the first grief, before the first passion, before the first rage, all that I’ve already experienced, already managed, already mastered, and by now I let myself be mastered by everything that has happened, by now I know how to live with grief, passion, rage, and death, I think I know how to live with them. But what I can’t live with is with the diminution of myself, not by others but by myself, made into a child not by the silly girls or protective aunts or Mutti, who doesn’t want to accept any passion so as to stay lucid and keep house because she knows that without her the house will fall apart like those sand castles children make on the Mocambo beach, and if she doesn’t do the work, who will? While I’m thinking about myself, Laura Díaz, I observe myself distant from my own life, as if I were someone else, a second Laura who sees the first separated from the world around me, indifferent to the people outside my home — is it healthy to be that way? — but concerned with those living here with me, but in both cases separated and yet guilty about being a burden, like the boy in Thomas Hardy’s novel, I am loved by everyone, but I weigh them down even if they don’t say so, I’m the grown-up little girl about to turn twenty-two without bringing bread to the house where she gets her daily bread, the big little girl who thinks herself justified because she reads books to her paralyzed father, because she loves them all and all of them love her. I will live from the love I give and from the love I receive. It isn’t enough, it isn’t enough to love my mother, to weep for my brother, to feel sorry for my father, it isn’t enough to adopt my own grief and my own tenderness as rights that liberate me from other responsibilities. Now I want to overflow my love for them, exceed my grief for them by freeing them from me, taking myself off their backs, giving them the gift of not worrying about me without my giving up worrying about them, Papa Fernando, Mutti Leticia, Aunts Hilda and Virginia and María de la O, Santiago my love, I’m not asking either comprehension or help from you, I’m going to do what I must to be with you without being of you but by being for you …

Juan Francisco López Greene was a very tall man, more than six feet, very dark, with both Indian and Negroid traces in his features — while his lips were thick, his profile was straight; while his hair was crinkly, his skin was smooth and sweet as sugar frosting, night-dark as a gypsy’s. His eyes were green islands in a yellow sea. His broad, muscular shoulders spoiled the look of his neck, which was strong but longer than it seemed, just as his arms were long and his devoutly proletarian hands were large. His torso was short, his legs long, and his feet bigger than miners’ shoes.

He was powerful, awkward, delicate, different.

He had come to the Casino ball with Xavier Icaza, the young labor lawyer, son of a family of aristocrats who now served the working class. It was he who brought to the dance this man so alien to the social profile of good Xalapa families: Juan Francisco López Greene.

Icaza, a brilliant but scarcely conventional man, wrote avant-garde poetry and picaresque tales; his books were illustrated with Cubist vignettes of skyscrapers and airplanes, and his poetry conveyed the sense of modern velocity that the author sought while his novels brought the tradition of Francisco de Quevedo and the Lazarillo de Tormes to modern Mexico City, a city that was filling up — as Icaza explained to groups of guests at the Casino ball — with immigrants from the countryside and that would only go on growing and growing. He winked at the local businessmen, now’s the time to buy cheap, Colonia Hipódromo, Colonia Nápoles, Chapultepec Heights, Parque de la Lama, even Desierto de los Leones, just you wait and see how real estate is going to boom, don’t be fools — he laughed with his cheery teeth — invest now.

He was called a Futurist, a Dadaist, an Estridentista, names that no one had ever heard before in Veracruz and that Icaza introduced with an almost insolent air by driving a yellow Isotta-Fraschini convertible, as if to establish his credentials immediately and well. He asked for the hand of Miss Ana Guido, and when her parents expressed doubts, Xavier Icaza drove his powerful automobile right up the stairs and into the cathedral one Sunday during Mass. The roar of the motor and the insane vision of the car going up the steep stairs with the young, high-spirited lawyer using all the horsepower at his disposal to do it. He dangerously stopped the car where the stairway ended and the atrium began and announced in a loud voice that he’d come to marry Ana and nothing and no one was going to stop him.

“I’m not dealing in make-believe,” the young lawyer Icaza was saying to his old acquaintances at the Casino ball, “this is a matter of mutual convenience. The Revolution has set free all the country’s dormant forces — the businessmen and industrialists who were thwarted while the Dictator turned over the country to foreigners, the functionaries whose careers were blocked by Porfirio’s old bureaucracy, and let’s not even start on the landless peasants and workers eager to organize and have a respected public voice. Listen, who were the rebels in the Rio Blanco factories and the Cananea mines, the first to rise up against the dictatorship? What were they if not workers?”

“Madero didn’t make any concessions to them,” said the father of the young rooster expert from Córdoba.

“Because Madero didn’t understand anything,” Icaza claimed. “On the other hand, the executioner Huerta, the man who murdered Madero, tried to get the support of the working class and permitted the biggest May Day demonstrations ever seen. He allowed for an eight-hour workday and six-day workweek, but when the unions asked him for democracy, that’s when he turned them down, he arrested the leaders and deported them. One of them is my friend here, Juan Francisco López Greene, to whom I introduce you with great pleasure. The Greene part doesn’t mean he’s English. Everybody in Tabasco is named Greene because they’re descendants of English pirates whose mothers were Indians or blacks, isn’t that right?”

Juan Francisco smiled and nodded. “Laura, you’re a cultured type. I’ll leave him to you,” Icaza said, charming and firm, and wandered off.

Laura suspected that this new arrival, so alien to provincial customs, who had appeared at the San Cayetano soirees like the “Jesus wearing six-guns” the Córdoba landowner had mentioned, would be personally awkward, like his huge miners’ shoes, square, thick, and hobnailed. She imagined that his speaking style was like a rain of stones punctuated by silence. She was therefore surprised to hear a smooth voice, serene and even sweet, in which each word bore the weight of conviction, which is why Juan Francisco López Greene let himself seem so gentle and speak so mildly.

“Is Xavier Icaza right?” Laura asked abruptly, looking for a way to begin the conversation.

Juan Francisco insisted. “Yes. I know very well that they all try to use us.”

“To use whom?” asked Laura, unaffectedly.

“The workers.”

“You’re a worker?” Laura again queried impulsively, speaking in the familiar mode to Juan Francisco, certain this wouldn’t offend him, challenging him slightly to address her as an equal, not as “miss,” uncertainly seeking common ground with this unknown man, sniffing him out, feeling herself a bit of a beast, a bit savage, as she’d never felt with Orlando, who made her think things that were perverse, refined, and so subtle that they evaporated like a poisonous perfume, strong but deleterious and short-lived.

He didn’t accept the challenge. “It’s a risk, miss. We just have to take the chance.”

(If only he’d speak familiarly to me, begged Laura, I want him to speak familiarly to me, not call me miss, I’d like for once to feel different, I want a man to say things to me, do things to me I don’t know or don’t expect or can’t ask for, I can’t ask him for that, it has to come from him, and on that depends everything that may come later, from a simple miss or no miss …)

“What risk might that be, Mr. Greene?” Laura reverted to formality.

“The risk that they’ll manipulate us, Laura.”

He added, without noticing (or perhaps pretending he didn’t see) the change in color of the girl’s face, that “we” could also extract advantages from “them.” Laura became accustomed right then and there to the strange plural which, without pretensions or false modesty, embraced a community — of workers, fighters, comrades, that’s right, and of the man speaking with her.

“Icaza has no illusions. But I do.” He smiled for the first time, with a trace of malice but more than anything else with self-irony, thought Laura. “I do.”

He said he had illusions because the Constitution made concessions to Mexican peasants and workers it did not have to make. Carranza was an old hacienda owner whose long white beard curled when he had to deal with workers and Indians; Alvaro Obregón was an intelligent but opportunistic Creole who could just as well dine with God or with the devil and make the devil believe he was actually God and convince God not to worry, because He could be a devil and had no reason to envy Lucifer; in any case, General Obregón would be the judge and would decree, You are the Devil … The Constitution consecrated the rights of the worker and of the land because without “us”—here we go again, Laura said to herself—“they” would not win the Revolution or keep themselves in power.

He asked her to dance, and she laughed through a grimace of pain and stepped-on dancing shoes, asking the labor leader if they might not better practice out on the balcony, and he also laughed and said yes, neither God nor the devil created me for ball-dancing … but if she was interested in what “we” were doing, he would tell her, out on the balcony, how the workers’ struggle organized itself during the Revolution. People thought the Revolution involved only a Creole elite followed by peasant guerrillas. They forgot that everything began in the factories and mines, in Rio Blanco and Cananea. The workers organized the Red Battalions that went out to fight Huerta’s dictatorship and founded the House of the Workers of the World in the Azulejos palace in Mexico City, in the aristocracy’s former Jockey Club. But because “we” were invaded by Huerta’s police, who arrested us and tried to burn the palace down, “we” were forced to flee. We found ourselves in the open arms of General Obregón.

“Be careful,” said Icaza, rejoining Laura and Juan Francisco. “Obregón is a fox. He wants worker support so he can undercut the followers of the peasant rebels, Zapata and Villa. He talks about a proletarian Mexico to provoke peasant and Indian Mexico. According to the Creole revolutionary leaders, who are cautious on this subject, that’s still the reactionary, backward, religious Mexico, suffocated by its scapularies and fumigated by the incense of too many churches. Be careful with the fraud, Juan Francisco, very careful.”

“But it’s the truth,” said Juan Francisco heatedly. “The peasants wear the image of the Virgin on their hats, they go to Mass on their knees, they aren’t modern, but Catholic and rural, Dr. Icaza.”

“Listen, Juan Francisco, stop calling me doctor or we’ll end up in a fistfight. And stop acting like such a hick. When you meet a young lady from high society whom you like, you do not address her as ‘miss,’ you dummy. Stop behaving like a reactionary, retarded, premodern peasant.” Xavier Icaza’s voice pealed with laughter.

But Juan Francisco insisted, with no trace of humor, that peasants were reactionaries, that urban workers were true revolutionaries, the fifteen thousand workers who fought in the Red Battalions, the hundred and fifty thousand members of the House of the Workers of the World — when had anything like that ever been seen in Mexico?

“Want some contradictions, Juan Francisco?” Icaza interrupted him. “Think about the battalions of Yaqui Indians who joined General Obregón to defeat the oh-so-agrarian Pancho Villa at the battle of Celaya. And start getting used to it, my friend. Revolutions are contradictory, and if they take place in a country as contradictory as Mexico, well, it can drive you crazy,” Icaza wailed, “as crazy as when you stare into Laura Daz’s eyes. In short, López Greene: when the Revolution came to power with Carranza and Obregón, did those leaders accept self-governance in the factories and the expulsion of foreign capitalists as the Red Battalions had been promised?”

No, said Juan Francisco, he knew “we” were going to live through a constant give-and-take with the government, but “we” are not going to give in on our fundamental principles; “we” have organized the biggest strikes in all Mexican history, we’ve resisted all the pressures of the revolutionary government that wanted to turn us into official labor puppets, we got salary increases, we always negotiate, we made Carranza nuts because he couldn’t figure out where we were vulnerable, he jailed us, called us traitors, we cut the light in Mexico City, they captured the head of the electricians, Ernesto Velasco, and put a gun to his temple as they asked how to turn the power back on, they broke us again and again, but “we” never give up, we always return to the fight, and we always go back to the negotiating table, we win, we lose, we’ll win a little and lose a lot, but it’s fine, it’s fine, no need to strike the colors, we know how to turn the lights on and off and they don’t, they need us.

“Armonía Aznar was an exemplary fighter,” said Juan Francisco López Greene when he unveiled the plaque in honor of the Catalan woman in the house where Laura and her family lived. “Like all the anarcho-syndicalists, she came to Veracruz. She arrived with the Spanish anarchist Amedeo Ferrés and secretly organized the printers and typographers during the Porfirio Díaz presidency. Then, during the Revolution, she fought in the House of the Workers of the World — with heroism and, which is more difficult, without glory, secretly delivering mail right here in Xalapa, carrying documents to and from Veracruz to Mexico City.”

Juan Francisco paused and sought out, among the hundred or so at the ceremony, the eyes of Laura Díaz.

“All she did was made possible thanks to the revolutionary generosity of Don Fernando Díaz, president of the bank, who allowed Armonía Aznar to take refuge here and carry out her work in secret. Don Fernando is ill, and I will be so bold as to salute him and thank him, his wife, and his daughter in the name of the working class. This discreet and valiant man acted in this way, he told us, in memory of his son Santiago Díaz, shot by thugs in the pay of the dictatorship. Honor to all of them.”

That night, Laura stared intensely into the mute eyes of her invalid father. Then she slowly repeated what Juan Francisco López Greene had said at the ceremony, and Fernando Díaz blinked. When Laura wrote on the little blackboard the family used to communicate with him, she wrote simply, THANK YOU FOR HONORING SANTIAGO. Then Fernando Díaz, as was his custom, opened his eyes very wide and made an immense effort not to blink. All of them, the women in the house, knew those two gestures well — blinking over and over again or not blinking until his eyeballs seemed ready to pop out of their sockets — though they had no idea what either meant. On this occasion, Fernando tried to raise his hands and clench his fists, but they fell on his lap, defeated. He simply arched his eyebrows like two circumflexes.

“Soon we’ll find a house where we can live and have hoarders right here on Bocanegra Street,” Mutti Leticia announced a few days later.

“I’ll read to Fernando every night,” said the writing aunt, Virginia, her lips tight and her eyes feverish. “Don’t worry, Laura.”

Laura went in to say good night to her mute father, to read passages from Jude the Obscure to him for half an hour, and she could imagine her father dead, his face made beautiful by death, death that would rejuvenate him. They would all have to wait for his death with confidence, even joy, because death would erase the traces of time from Don Fernando, and Laura would always have with her the image of a tender, strong man whenever she needed it.

“Don’t let this chance slip by,” said her aunt the pianist, Hilda Kelsen, that same night. “Look at my hands. You know what I could have been, isn’t that true, Laura? I never want you to have to say the same thing.”

Laura Díaz and Juan Francisco López Greene were married in a court in Xalapa on May 12, 1920, Laura’s birthday, and she who sang on the twelfth of May the Virgin dressed in white came walking into sight with her coat so gay, and the black Zampaya swept and sang ora la cachimbá-bimbá-bimbá now my black girl dance to me now my black girl dance away, and Laura Díaz went out with her husband on the Interoceanic to Mexico City and halfway there she burst into tears because she’d forgotten the Chinese doll Li Po in her pillows back in Xalapa and at the Tehuacán station Juan Francisco was told that President Venustiano Carranza had been assassinated at Tlaxcalantongo.